


Bethlehem Steel

by Beabaseball (beabaseball)



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bruce Wayne is Not Batman, Corpse Desecration, Court of Owls, M/M, Murder, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2019-09-20 20:45:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17029716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beabaseball/pseuds/Beabaseball
Summary: There's one type of story to tell in a world where Bruce Wayne and Batman are separate people, and then there's the one where Bruce Wayne inherited his father’s mask in the Court of Owls.





	1. Chapter 1

There's one type of story to tell in a world where Bruce Wayne and Batman are separate people, and then there's the one where Bruce Wayne inherited his father’s mask in the Court of Owls.

Martha and Thomas are long dead, of course: but not before Thomas could introduce his son to the long… tradition that their family had a hand in founding.

And Bruce cannot break tradition.

He wants to flee Gotham as soon as he turns eighteen, but there’s a member of the Court there, in the room, as he signs the papers to finally gain control of his inheretence–and before the ink is even dried, they pull him into the other room and congratulate him with a smile upon becoming a Member of Society for _real_. Now, of course, Bruce will be expected to make his first meeting that night. They’ve hosted it special, just for him: the prodigal son.

Bruce has a split second decision to make.

He can punch the man and run.

Or he can smile.

…

It’s hard to leave a place to go learn how to suffer when you think you can see a clear path right ahead of you. The path Bruce sees is the one that leads to Grandmaster. If he can control the court, he will have their funds at his disposal. He will have the power to wave his hand and silence a room. He will have an absolute rein on the assassin.

He won’t have to pretend to be _stupid_ anymore.

(And god, at eighteen, assaulted with ideation and paparazzi, he just wants to be _normal_ in public for once.)

It will take time to work his way up to Grandmaster. He knows this. He knows it may take years. But he can do it. He can stop being dumb. He can grin and bear it. He can control any room he steps in–

It is seven years later, and Bruce Wayne only knows how to throw a punch from the boxing he does as a hobby.

There is no Batman.

There is only an– an _underling_. A man who is in the room with the Grandmaster unmasked. Who goes to cocktail parties and laughs like a shadow, with voices he knows from one place and faces he knows from another.

And Gotham is still hell.

He hasn’t saved anyone. He hasn’t made a difference. He’s complicit, and he’s drowning, and–

It’s a small thing that starts it. A small detail.

Stripping the Talon’s costume off its mangled body to let it heal, he finds puncture holes in the gloves; ones that match up to the claws on the Talon’s fingers.

The next time the court votes on a sacrificial lamb, Bruce watched the Talon, paying the mindless thing attention for the first time: and its fists are clenched so tightly it punctures the glove.

It happens again, the next time. Each time after. Every time they order a death in Gotham, the Talon is trembling, showing anger on an otherwise fully masked body.

And once he sees it, he cannot stop seeing it anymore.

It is hard to divert from a path when you see it so clearly in front of you. And the road to Grandmaster is not a clear path. Not anymore.

…

This is what he does:

Bruce Wayne brings the Grandmaster a glass of wine. A nightcap.

The Grandmaster thanks him, and drinks it, and Bruce smiles as he froths at the mouth, clutching his throat.

Talon tackles him to the floor, claws out and silent, and Bruce doesn’t struggle.

He says, “it’s okay.”

And Talon stills.

“It’s okay,” Bruce says, and reaches up to pull off Talon’s mask. “You don’t have to kill for anyone ever again.”

* * *

Bruce stabs the Grandmaster five times with sacred knives, drops the naked body in the Finger River, and drives Talon home in the trunk of his car. The water will disguise the time of death, if the tide doesn’t wash the body into the ocean.

He pauses to pull through a CVS a third of the way across town. Buys a ginger ale.  Inside the CVS, he calls Alfred. Tells him to take the next day off. Bruce is bushed. Won’t be doing anything tomorrow but sleeping and maybe order in a pizza.

Alfred has taken the hint. By the time Bruce pulls in the front drive, there’s no one to be seen around the mansion, and Talon unfolds himself like a cardboard cutout from the trunk. 

His eyes are dark, now that Bruce has the mask off.

His eyes are dark, and they never stop moving.

They take in the mansion. The trees. They count the windows in moments. The number and location of chimneys. Visible doors.

He doesn’t move forward until Bruce gestures for him to, and leads him into the house.

His eyes dart. Chandelier: kitchen door: three closets: front hallway opening: double-broached stairwell: three visible doors above: arched windows: skylights:

It must look like a deathtrap to him. So many openings and windows and hidden doors.

But Bruce leads him to the kitchen and asks, “Can you still eat?”

He receives no answer. Not a nod or a shake of the head. Just eye twitches, counting the knives on the wall. The spatulas and pots and pans Alfred has hanging above the industrial sink.

He isn’t entirely sure what to make of this non-answer, when Talon seems to still be able to make his own decisions still. It wasn’t as if he had ordered Talon to crawl into his trunk and follow him home. Talon had followed Bruce out, spotted the car, and gotten into it with just a moment of thought.

Bruce pops open the ginger ale and hands it to him.

Talon takes a drink.

It spills right out his mouth as he panics (visibly panicking) in front of Bruce at the carbonation, until it runs down his chin.

Bruce takes a deep sigh, pops open what’s left of his merlot from last night, and downs half of it before busting out the paper towels and patting down Talon’s front.

–

Talon, at the very least, knows how to shower on his own, though he clearly has no idea to use the shampoo and soaps left inside. Bruce asks if he has a name.

Some Talons do. A lot, really, even if they don’t always go by them. They’re recorded with names, usually.

This one doesn’t. A decision of the… former Grandmaster. This was the first Talon made under his rule. Experiments were bound to happen as the ages passed. This one had been successful enough. A functioning, working Talon. A Talon who completed his jobs–even if he was a Talon who was…

Volunteered.

(There were plenty of Talons like that–but also plenty of candidates. The last survivor of the maze would be the one chosen. He doesn’t fully understand how this one who doesn’t want to kill would be the one who emerged victorious–but perhaps they had a weak crop that turn. Perhaps it had been a rushed affair after a defective Talon was in the process of being discarded. Perhaps this one had waited, biding his time until the end, and only submitted to the survival urge in self defense when the final hunter had been upon him. Bruce doesn’t know. His sights in those early years had been so focused on the Grandmaster position and trying to ignore the place beneath even the Court’s feet–)

(Bruce has not traveled the world to hone himself. Has not learned twenty meditation patterns to take himself from any amount of torture or pain. The way he’s numbed himself to how evil people thought was by walking among one group and trying to survive when they knew his name, his face, his family.

It is perhaps not the best way to learn. No safety net. Jumping right in at eighteen.

And now he’s jumped right on off the ledge, into the sea of killers.)

–

The Talon does not know his name anymore, though he does not speak much in general, unless commanded. Bruce is trying not to do that, even when telling Talon to change into more comfortable clothes after his shower, leaving a small stack on the sink counter to be looked through. Talon comes out wearing as much as it seems he could fit on: three shirts, a jacket, sweatpants. He’s bundled up and bogged down with enough fabric that Bruce simply sighs and doesn’t bother to say anything. He didn’t double-wear sweatpants, and so Bruce had to conclude that the sheer number of shirts and jacket was deliberate.

(Perhaps it feels more like armor.)

…partway down the hall, towards the hideaway Bruce will stow him in, Bruce asks, “do you have family?”

For once, the lack of response bears an answer he didn’t expect.

“…if I find them, do you want to go back?”

…this time, a shake of the head.

…Bruce makes a grunt of response, and brings Talon to the Bunker. Started during the red scare. Expanded on Bruce’s own time into an entrance to the caves beneath the manor, where not even the Owls have mapped. A quiet place to hide, already with its own bed, and medical supplies, and rations.

“You can hide here for now,” Bruce told the Talon, gesturing to the bed. To the caves. Far off, bats are chittering. Talon looks off towards them. “Until they give up the search, and we can move more freely.”

Talon nods, and without a look back, crawls into the sheets, and is asleep.

–

The next day, the Owls call for an emergency meeting.

The Grandmaster’s body is bobbing by the pier, and Talon is missing.

Bruce tells his distressed story of bidding the Grandmaster goodnight and seeing the Talon lurking in the room but thinking nothing of it, while the man in his bunker sleeps safely on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this has been existing on the batman blog as little segments of a fic; in light of of the tumblr exodus, i'm moving what I have so far here instead. thanks for understanding, everyone


	2. Chapter 2

It takes about a month to entrust Alfred with the secret in the bunker. He assumes Alfred has already figured at least part of it out, and is keeping quiet out of a sense of ‘respecting boundaries.’ 

His and Alfred’s relationship was always a strange one. He doesn’t expect it to get any easier when the reason for his sudden 'extra appetite' is revealed, climbing on the material in the bunker to get a closer look at the native bats. 

“So uh,” he says, gesturing to the dark figure in sweatpants and three layers of hoodies climbing a long-dead stalagmite. “Here’s batty.” 

“Ah,” Alfred says, seemingly unruffled at the gray-skinned, golden-eyed thing in the cave. “Indeed.”

Bruce wonders how much Alfred knew about the Owls from serving under his father. If Alfred knew much of anything before the nights Bruce would pack his bags, pace through the room, count the hidden dollars he’d held together with rubber bands and stuffed inside his mattress as soon as he learned the value of mistrust--

He doesn’t know how much Alfred knew, or how well known he is to the Owls, but Alfred procures him a body. Bruce decides he will investigate instead of asking questions outright. But it is a body. And it has died of hypothermia. 

A long bath of chemicals and enough disfigurement, and it is passable as the Talon. They open up the septic system in the yard and soak the leftover armor in it a short while, and then clothe the body in Talon armor and several layers of eighth-hand clothes, traded from kids in Crime Alley for money or slightly better winter clothes. 

They leave the body at the end of a sewer grate off the pier, an arm sticking through the bars and with no fingerprints or teeth enough for a dental record to identify it. The police would be baffled but some insiders would pull enough strings to leave it alone. The Owls would be left to assume their rogue Talon had frozen sometime in the last month and was no longer a threat. 

Bruce follows the lines that Alfred walked to get the body, and learns how to do it himself by observation, the same way he’s learned everything. 

He doesn’t ask how Alfred learned it. 

\-- 

The thing in their basement does need some sort of sustenance, and they can’t in good conscience send him out into the world free only to starve to death. The chemical bath the Owls use is too much of a dependency, and one they don’t have in the bunker anyway, but whatever remains of a body system will definitely shut down without  _ something.  _

And at the same time, this body hasn’t had to process food for years. It’s hard to know if it can really handle much anymore. Bruce had him on an IV feed for the first three weeks. 

The Talon still follows orders better than anything. Bruce still tries not to give them. The closest it comes was ‘let me put this needle in the back of your hand and don’t take it out.’ It tries to eat anything they indicate they want him to. They judge how well the food works based on how much vomiting occurs, and how well the vital signs are doing after a meal. 

At the moment, hot broth is the ‘favorite.’ Liquid meals stay down best. Nothing that lowers the body temperature so much that the outside environment can’t bring it right back up. Jello, soup, sports drinks, and juice. Tea with honey. No dairy. They dissolve supplements in as much as they can. They hope to move him to mashed potatoes soon. 

If nothing else, potatoes can sustain a regular human being for a long while on their own. If they can get Talon to a point where he can do the same, then that’s a major obstacle lowered to independence. 

Not that they are sure where he would go. 

...Bruce comes down to the bunker to talk, when he has a few moments, and still asks the Talon about if he knows anywhere he can go. If he remembers anything. If he can tell Bruce his old name, so at least they have something to call him. 

Talon still does not recall his old name. 

“Alright, Batsy,” he says, exhausted from a long night between the office and the Owls, and Alfred out running late-night errands. He sets down a tray of energy drink and apple juice bottles, a bowl of broth, and jello for ‘dessert.’ “Anything new today?”

Talon doesn’t respond, but he starts to eat without being prompted, drinking the energy juice first. 

He isn’t stupid. He doesn’t seem to have to be taught how to do things. He just needs permission to do them. Taking even a little initiative to open a bottle is a good sign, Bruce tries to think. 

The Owls are electing a new Grandmaster, and being an understudy these last years at least place him in the running. They haven’t started training a new Talon yet. And the Talon here is still alive, even if he’s still hiding in a bunker, and hasn’t left for over a month. He tries to tell himself things are okay and still moving, even when the world is dragging its feet through Spring. 

And obviously, Talon doesn’t reply, because of course there’s nothing new. 

When Alfred comes back from the store, loaded with immune-boosters and vitamins alongside their usual purchases, he also suggests perhaps it is time to retire Bruce’s old wallscreen TV. He’ll place an order for something newer. They can throw the old thing out-- or move it to the basement, perhaps, if Bruce has sentimental value attached to it still. 

Bruce blinks hard at Alfred over the dinner table, and waves a hand downwards slowly before saying, “What is the TV going to do in the basement?” 

And Alfred says, “Well, it was certainly the only way to get  _ you  _ to talk when all you did was hole up in one room, wait for meals, and stare at walls all day.” 

Bruce doesn’t say anything else. 

He moves the TV downstairs along with the VHS player attachment. The new one will arrive in two days. 

In the meantime, Bruce also makes plans to remodel one of the sitting rooms to look a bit more modern. Some of the furniture he moves into storage. One of the white couches, he covers in a tarp and moves downstairs. He covers the tarp in a few blankets, and pushes it into the bunker, across from the TV, along with a waterproof cabinet filled with old VHS tapes. 

He spends the two days waiting for the new TV showing Talon how to play and rewind VHS tapes; watching  _ Juliet of the Spirits  _ and  _ Casablanca _ .

Talon sits with his feet up under him and his knees pulled close to his chest. His hair is starting to get unruly, and Alfred will start insisting on cutting it soon. He’s pulled one of the blankets around himself and it’s draped over his knees like bat wings. He doesn’t seem to notice he’s started curling up, and Bruce says nothing. 

By the end of  _ Casablanca _ , occasionally he’s started taking his fingers together and holding them to his mouth, as if smoking an invisible cigarette. 

_ Here’s looking at you, kid.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> though modern day interprets 'here's looking at you kid' as a statement of forgone love, the original phrase was commonly used as a farewell during wwii and pre-wwii as a statement of good luck
> 
> here's lookin at you, kids.


End file.
